Republicans Consider Pretending to Hate Millionaires to Cut Their Taxes

One of the biggest obstacles facing Republicans’ tax-reform fever dream is convincing anyone that slashing taxes on the rich is really a gift to the middle class. Of course, dropping the pass-through rate to 25 percent, eliminating the estate tax, and lowering the corporate rate to 20 percent, as the G.O.P.’s chief tax-plan team has proposed, wouldn’t do much for ordinary Americans at all, while delivering all kinds of burnt-sienna giveaways to the wealthy. To compound the problem, people like Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn haven’t been doing a great job of selling the plan, with the former saying in an interview with Politico that it’s nearly impossible not to cut taxes on the wealthy and the latter admitting on TV that he couldn’t guarantee some members of the middle class wouldn’t ultimately pay more in taxes.

Clearly irked by these amateurs, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has many more years of experience deceiving the public, told CBS News on Friday that the G.O.P.’s tax plan “is about the people, about half of which are living paycheck to paycheck, and giving them a break on their taxes.” Other House Republicans also apparently have a strategy to help sell the People’s Tax Plan: painting a thin veneer of populism over what remains a massive gift to the donor class.

Axios reports that Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee are “currently exploring not cutting the income-tax rate for people who earn $1 million or more per year.” Obviously, that would make for a great headline if you’re trying to convince people that your plan is all about the common man, until you dig down just one inch below the layer of G.O.P. spin. Currently, the marginal tax rate for people making $418,000 or more a year is 39.6 percent; under the plan released in September, everyone making more than $418,000 would pay 35 percent. But now, Republicans are thinking it would sound great if they could say that anyone earning over $1 million would not enjoy that cut. So, they’re considering just bumping people who earn between $418,000 and $999,999 a year into a lower tax bracket.

As New York’s Ed Kilgorepoints out, this appears to be expressly designed to rob Democrats of the talking point that the G.O.P.’s plan is designed to reduce taxes on millionaires (and billionaires) by making cuts to federal programs that overwhelmingly help the poor. What the G.O.P. won’t mention as it trumpets its phony class war is that “even if the top rate remains unchanged, millionaires will still get a tax cut on their first $1 million in earnings; only income above that level would still be taxed at the top rate.” And, as we noted on Friday, all of the really big benefits to the wealthy—the elimination of the estate tax, the slashing of the pass-through and corporate rates—are still all there. But the odds of Team Trump or Paul Ryan bringing that up are about as good as the odds Trump will tell a Gold Star father he‘ll send him $25,000 and follow through without being publicly shamed first.

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Ivanka tries to sell tax plan as pro-family

Elsewhere in the tax-reform bait-and-switch, First Daughter and presidential adviser Ivanka Trump, who in August blessed the administration’s decision to abandon an Obama-era rule aimed at closing the gender pay gap, traveled to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to pitch her father’s tax plan as a positive move for working middle-class families. “For me, this tax plan really couples together two things that are really core values as a country, which is working and supporting the American family,” she said at a town hall on Monday, adding that the proposal to slash the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent would allow companies to spur growth that would ultimately help families, despite the fact that studies suggest otherwise. Trump also focused on the proposal to expand the $1,000 child-care tax credit (the details of which have yet to be worked out), saying, “Every parent has to manage the competing demands of raising a family and their passions . . . I too had to manage that, but I'm far more fortunate than most and I had help,” which might be the understatement of both this century and last.

Ex-Obama economist: Trump’s claim on wages is hogwash

Of the many bonkers claims Trump & Co. has been making about its tax plan, one of the most outlandish may be that, on the conservative end, corporate tax cuts will boost the average U.S. household’s annual income by at least $4,000, and that on the “more optimistic” end, that number could top $9,000 a year. This, according to former White House Council of Economic Advisers chairman Jason Furman, is one of the most absurd things to come out of the White House since January 20, 2017, and as we all know, that'ssayingalot.

The White House claims that the average household would see between $4,000 and $9,000 more in its paychecks every year. But if all 125 million households got a raise like that, it would amount to an annual increase in total wages of between $550 billion and $1.1 trillion. That’s between 275% and 550% of the total cost of the $200 billion corporate tax cut—implying a supply-side effect that’s more than a little far-fetched . . . Well-designed business-tax reform would include permanent expensing, elimination of the corporate interest deduction, a more robust and competitive international system, and fully paid-for reductions in the corporate rate. Such changes could help boost wages modestly over time. But the current plan falls short on all of these counts—and it is workers who will ultimately bear the cost of the White House’s wild claims.

Fidelity portfolio manager: if I’ve been an a-hole, I’ve been an equal-opportunity a-hole

Last week, the president of Fidelity Investments’ stock-picking unit held an emergency meeting to stress to his staff that the firm has a “zero tolerance policy” for inappropriate behavior in the workplace. While employees have reportedly been complaining to human resources and superiors about portfolio managers’ abusive behavior for years, the abrupt “resignation” of veteran employee C. Robert Chow earlier this month on the heels of allegations that he made sexual comments to colleagues, and the September firing of Gavin Baker, a star stock picker who who had allegedly been sexually harassing a junior female employee, apparently underscored the need to make the company’s principles clear.

Presumably, most people came away from the meeting with a cut-and-dry idea of what is considered appropriate behavior toward one’s colleagues. Then there’s James Morrow, who manages approximately $28 billion at Fidelity’s equity unit, and, according to the Journal, has been accused by “several women” within the last five years of making “disparaging comments” toward them, in addition to allegedly bullying “well-performing analysts, male and female, whose investing style he didn’t agree with, by docking their scores in compensation reviews.” Morrow, who denied such allegations through a spokesman, stressed that, “If analysts ever felt I was difficult, it has been unequivocally gender-blind.” You see, he was a jerk to everyone, so it’s fine.